We are currently using Infragistics winforms controls v8. We are not satisfied with the performance of our application and want to speed it up. Is it worth trying to upgrade these Infragistics components to latest version? Or are they even more bloated now?
thanks in advance
We upgraded from 2008 to 2010.3 a few months ago. The upgrade process itself posed no problems. In my experience there has been no perceivable performance improvement between the 2008.3 controls and the current 2011.1 controls at either design or runtime, however we didn't upgrade for performance reasons, mainly for support reasons.
As the 2008 controls are now out of support, upgrading to the latest version would certainly help bring you up to date with the latest patches.
If you are experiencing some performance issues in your Windows Forms application I would like to suggest you looking into one very useful article which explains some of the ways that might be followed in order of improving the performance of your application:
http://forums.infragistics.com/forums/t/15306.aspx?PageIndex=1
Related
We are contemplating building an upcoming project in Silverlight. We would be developing this in SL 4, not 3, but another developer in our organization had the experience of upgrading from v2 to v3 in the middle of a project, and losing features and functionality that MS didn't include in v3. This was some headache for him, working around this, and my team are wondering if others have had similar headaches (i.e. lack of backwards compatibility) in upgrades from v3 to v4 -- as a way to possibly predict if we're going to run into serious problems when SL goes from v4 to v5.
The application we will be building doesn't "need" advanced SL features, and could easily be built as a plain vanilla ASP.NET web application. We would like to learn to use SL, however, and this is an opportunity to do so -- but not at the expense of SL munging our future maintenance efforts by making it problematic to upgrade framework versions.
Any experiences out there?
The automatic project conversion wizard in Visual Studio does a great job, and Silverlight 4 is mainly additions of new features (not removing of existing ones).
We have had one Silverlight project (out of a dozen) stop rendering certain controls properly with Silverlight 4, but that was down to a slight runtime engine change to Silverlight itself and likely down to us misusing the controls.
Otherwise it has been plain sailing. SL 4 is definitely the way to go. The improvements to Expression Blend 4 alone were worth the upgrade (Expression 3 tended to crash editing style templates of Telerik Rad controls).
I warn you now, once the Silverlight bug bite you, you will have trouble going back to ASP.Net :)
Hope this helps.
2 to 3 was a bigger leap.
3 to 4 should be painless.
Read this article on Silverlight Compatibility:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nickkramer/archive/2010/09/11/how-does-silverlight-compatibility-work.aspx
Your users probably wont have it and would probably need to install SL4 before they can use it
In PDC sessions i see only Framework 4.0, Azure and WPF.
My all applications is in windows forms and asp.net (codebehind) and framework 2.0 or 3.5. I see i'am obsolete, ok. But my questions is Windows Forms is dead, i need start migrate to WPF or Silverlight? or my Windows forms with Devexpress can leave more than 3 years?
It's not really dead or alive -- more like undead.
I don't think I'd say WinForms is dead... is DOS dead? Do you ever write a console app? There's way to many programs out there on Windows (really the majority of them) that use WinForms for it to just die. Remember Y2K and all those systems needing to be updated from Cobol (or was it Fortran?). Personally, I'm migrating to WPF, but there's still a time and place for WinForms I believe... C++ is still being used even though we all have C# now, kind of the same concept I think.
I've just installed VS2010 C# Express edition and there's still the option to create a WinForms project. I expect that the options still there in the full version too (I'm currently without an MSDN subscription so I can't get it at the moment).
So I think that there's still life in the technology.
By all means move to WPF or Silverlight, but do it because they offer you something you can't get from WinForms.
Windows Forms is no more dead than VBScript is dead. And I'm currently working with some fairly atrocious classic ASP VBSCript code, so I can assure you, it's not dead either (alas).
Win Forms will be around pretty much until Microsoft drops Win32 entirely, and even then it'll still be around in legacy systems for several more years.
Well, there are many differences between these two and probably it would be a good idea to establish some roadmap in order to migrate your application. There are many hundreds of websites for their comparison, but in order to answer your question, I suggest to start a new branch and start migrating while supporting your current models. With your current one you wouldn't have that much of problems either.
I am at the initial stage of designing a client application. However, being new to WPF and having already gained some experience in Win forms development, time pressures on the project means that there is a risk to going down the WPF route. If time were no pressure, then I would say forget forms and design with WPF. However, I am not lucky enough to have this luxury. Having spent a little time investigating the Composite Application Block for Forms, I have decided that I will definitely develop the application within this framework. However, there are 2 versions of the CAB, 1 for WinForms that targets the .Net 2.0 runtime which has now been retired, and then the WPF version which targets .Net 3.5. Not being a fan of 'retired' code libraries, I would prefer to use the WPF version of CAB. This may be a silly question, but is it possible to use the WPF version of CAB for Win forms application developement? I do envisage at some point in the future moving to towards WPF. If I could use the WPF version of CAB I am hoping that this would make it easier to migrate the forms application to WPF.
It looks like somebody had the same idea that you did.
I found it by reading this thread on the CompositeWPF codeplex forum, discussing this very issue.
You should be able to do this without too many issues. We are currently using CAB to enable us to display SQL Reporting Services reports in WPF (along with a couple other items). It's a pretty simple implementation, but our architecture is WPF-based, not WinForms. As far as we've been able to tell, there wouldn't be much of a problem were it the other way around, and displaying both types of forms is done the same way.
I'm considering switching from MFC to WPF.
My first concern is that there are too many users who don't have .NET with WPF installed yet. Can anybody point to a source containing the WPF penetration numbers?
My second concern is speed.
Any other considerations?
I've been banging away at WPF for a while now. It is brilliant, but it still has (occasional) holes you've to plug yourself. However all indications are .NET 4.0 will be a significant step forward.
I would say start now. The WPF learning curve is REALLY steep, and it'll be a while before you'll be releasing software to users, believe me. Also do yourself a favour and get the WPF Unleashed book. It's superior.
Speed isn't a consideration. The power WPF gives is well worth any drawbacks with speed, which - coming from Windows Forms - I haven't noticed to be honest.
What kind of application are you developing? If it's a wide-distribution desktop app that you want your grandmother to install, your concern about .NET 3.0/3.5 adoption is valid. So far from what I've seen, performance is less of a concern.
WPF penetration
First of all, Windows Vista and Windows 7 both have WPF preinstalled, which accounts for 35% of the market automatically. Windows XP has had it as it had .NET Framework 3.0 as an option in Windows Update for over three years, and many applications ship with it, so it is likely to also be installed on a high percentage of Windows XP machines. StatOwl indicates that about 80% of NET Framework installations are version 3 or above.
If you're shipping on CD it is no big deal to include the latest .NET Framework on the CD and have it install automatically. If users are downloading your application, it can contact Microsoft's web server to download and install the latest .NET Framework. Online ClickOnce deployment also has this capability if you want people to be able to start their application directly from the web browser without installing it.
So the bottom line is, you probably don't need to worry about whether people will have WPF installed on their machines or not unless your target market consists primarily of dial up customers on Windows XP who don't run much third-party software (i.e., they just run Windows and your application).
Speed
Not an issue. I have a 200 MHz Pentium Pro with 384 MB RAM from 1998 that I test my software on, and my WPF applications have comparable performance with equivalent MFC applications. If your WPF application uses lots of fancy graphics and animation it will run slowly on ancient CPUs and graphics cards, but so would an ordinary MFC application with the same features.
Don't even bother trying to use WPF if you are sticking with Visual Studio 2008 for the next year or two. The experience will be way too painful. I'm talking about "my IDE crashed again" type of pain.
If you are going to use VS 2010 in the near future, then WPF is a blast. Download the beta, a couple of themes off CodePlex, are start playing. Once you get past the (freaking huge) learning curve I think you will find it to be quite enjoyable.
IMHO, you should wait for Visual Studio 2010 and WPF 4.0 to make the actual migration. They will close some very annoying gaps in the product.
Meanwhile, you can try it out. In terms of coding/readability -- it's going to be WAAAY better than with MFC =)
As for the performance and platform -- it shouldn't be a problem unless you have any very special circumstances (like if you can't require users to install .NET).
Also see this related question on switching to WPF from Windows Forms.
If you are thinking about a larger, modular, appliation I recommend checking out Prism. It's a bit of a beast itself, but you should be able to tackle it after coming to grips with C#, Dependency Properties and XAML. Plus, learning Prism gave me a much better understanding of WPF/Silverlight, at least from the development/binding side.
Mike Taulty posted an excellent 10 part video series on Prism. It's a great way to get your head around the platform.
I'd also recommend the pages linked to from the Getting Started page on codeplex. After all that, you're probably ready to tackle the Reference Implementation which comes with the download.
A previous answer of mine might also help clear up any remaining confusion around Controllers/Presenters in the framework that you might have (I did).
Can someone suggest a good UI framework for WinForms development? What I'm looking for is something that is fairly mature (=bug-free), renders well and quickly, and does not bloat my program with 10Mb assemblies.
Me and my team all use Telerik. The result is a stunningly good looking GUI, the controls are very mature and easy to use.
I've purchased the developer express report control and it does not scale well at all. It maxes out the CPU on our webservers when producing a report with 10k+ rows on it. So I can't recommend developer express.
I use developer express. IMHO cleaner more rational API than infragistics, fewer bugs with visual studio and help integration. I never look at the size of assemblies.. it's not a really useful metric for me in .net installs. Just to install hello world you are looking at massive downloads and long .net framework installs.
I’d suggest looking at DevExpress WinForms UI library which ships with over 190 high-performance and fully customizable UI controls and over 50 amazing application themes.
DevExpress is the only UI component vendor to offer WinForms DirectX rendering support. By moving to DirectX, their controls have achieved the highest possible performance and brilliant High DPI rendering quality.
You can try all DevExpress products for 30 days for free at https://www.devexpress.com/try
You can also consider Nevron Open Vision for .NET (https://www.nevron.com/products-open-vision.aspx).
It contains 70+ UI components, plus advanced Chart, Grid, Diagram, Rich Text Editor, Gauge and Schedule components. All components can be integrated into any WinForms, WPF, Xamarin.Mac and Blazor - WebAssembly project.
The solution features hardware acceleration on most platforms (renders really fast), and is very lightweight.